


MORTAL FOOLISHNESS

by Mikkeneko



Series: A SPIRIT OUT OF FADE [2]
Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II
Genre: Anders no, Anders yes, Childbirth, Crack, Humor, Illness, Justice is so very done, Justice why are you giving advice on the proper way to masturbate, M/M, Public Masturbation, You don't even have a body, gross food, public embarrassment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-27
Updated: 2015-09-27
Packaged: 2018-04-23 13:45:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4879117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mikkeneko/pseuds/Mikkeneko
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five Times Justice Did Not Wish To Involve Himself In Mortal Foolishness</p>
            </blockquote>





	MORTAL FOOLISHNESS

_Anders,_   Justice’s voice said in his ear, and Anders groaned. It wasn’t really a voice and it wasn’t really in his ear, but it was easier to think of it that way to keep from going crazy. Er.  _Anders, wake up!_

Maker, his stomach hurt. Actually his everything hurt, from his head down to his toes, but there was a band of pain wrapped around his abdomen that seemed to be centering in his lower back, and a slow rolling nausea in his stomach. It wasn’t really  _too_   much of a surprise, considering that Darktown cuisine mostly consisted of rats and their winged counterparts, pigeons.

“I’m awake,” he groaned, rolling towards the side of his cot – and flat onto his face on the floor.

Maybe the rat king-tail fricassee had been a mistake.

 _We require healing,_   Justice prodded him.  _I tried, but I could find no wound.  We are sick. We are in pain._

“I noticed,” Anders grumbled, and managed to roll onto his back to stare up at the ceiling of his clinic. With an effort, he summoned healing magic and turned it into himself – tendrils of magic questing down into his abdomen, seeking out the damage.

What he found there made him groan aloud, and thunk the back of his head against the stone floor. Kidney stone. A blighted kidney stone, that was all they needed. He ought to have known – since coming to Kirkwall it had been a constant struggle to find drinkable water, and purifying it had seemed like more trouble than it was worth. He’d let himself get too dehydrated for too long and now he had to deal with a kidney stone.  _Just great._

 _Healing!_   Justice insisted, and Anders growled.

“I can’t heal this,” he said with a sigh. “We’ll just have to – wait it out. Well, there are some potions I can brew…” His mind went over his stock of herbs and ingredients, looking for something that would raise his acidity levels enough to do the trick.

 _And this potion will heal us?_   Justice inquired hopefully.

“Well, sort of,” Anders hedged. “More like it will… help dissolve the stone, erode it around the edges to make it smaller, maybe break it into a couple pieces, small enough to… pass.”

Despite keeping his words vague, the knowledge was all there in Anders’ mind, and as Justice absorbed it Anders received a wave of outrage in response.  _You cannot POSSIBLY be serious!_   The spirit squawked.  _That is completely disgusting!_

Anders grinned. “Welcome to the mortal world, spirit,” he said. Justice huffed and withdrew deeper into his mind, leaving Anders to put up with the nauseating discomfort alone. “Thanks for that,” he muttered, and started the effort of pushing himself to his feet.

* * *

 _Anders, no,_  Justice protested, even as Anders put his foot on the bench.

“Anders, YES!” Anders countered, swaying slightly as he hoisted himself up. It was a Darktown dust-up mustered together collectively by the gangs of the Undercity. They’d insisted he come, and wouldn’t even accept the one-copper cover charge from him. There were rough-hewn tables, potluck dishes (Anders prudently avoided the king-tail fricassee,) and even some watered-down moonshine. But for someone who hadn’t drunk alcohol since before coming to Kirkwall, it was still enough.

Now the moon was high and there was actual music, at least in the form of drums and pipes and enthusiastic singing. And grumpy music-hating spirit in his head or no, Anders was determined to join in.

 _I do not hate_ ** _music_** _,_  Justice objected.  _Music is an integral part of the composition of the Veil, the warp against which color and beauty is wefted to form the base of all dreams. Music is sacred. THIS is not MUSIC._

“Close enough!” Anders shouted as on his third attempt he made it up onto the table. Drunken Darktowners cheered as he stood atop it, swaying slightly, hooting and urging him on.

 _This is not keeping our head down, either,_   Justice complained.  _You would not let us break up that fight in the lowtown bazaar because you feared attracting the attention of the Templars. Will this not attract the attention of the Templars?_

 _Shush, you,_   Anders thought back, then raised his voice. “All right, everyone! Who here’s heard the ballad of Shartan and Andraste!” Calls of agreement drifted up from the crowd. Anders grinned, a drunken sloppy grin, planted his hands on his hips and waggled his pelvis. “And who here knows the  _rude_  version?” he shouted.

Anders woke up the next day in a rooftop gutter with his pants on backwards, head pounding and with only vague flashes of the night before – the party, the song, the sudden crash of armored guardsmen to break up the party. Most of the rest of the evening was lost in a flurry of fire, running, and the smell of scorched hair.

 _You are NEVER getting this drunk ever again,_ Justice said firmly within his mind, and Anders sighed agreement.

* * *

 _You cannot seriously be thinking of eating that,_    Justice protested, revulsion clear in the spirit’s ‘voice.’

“’S traditional,” Anders replied, licking the gravy off the spoon as he felt Justice’s disapproval. It was Satinalia, and he’d been invited to a dinner by one of his patients – technically by seven of his patients, all members of the same family of Ferelden refugees. The family was huge, and their Lowtown residence was not – three generations of people crammed into an apartment no bigger than his own clinic, with Anders trying to keep himself out of the way crammed into a small corner. He had to wonder if he hadn’t been invited less out of gratitude and more to have a healer on hand when Cousin Rolando finally lost his temper and drew a knife on Uncle Reginald. Maker, and he’d thought  _Hawke’s_   family was bad.

Still, he wasn’t going to begrudge them, especially not when after the main dish was wheeled out – in the finest Ferelden tradition, a whole roasted sheep – they had set aside the cauldron of simmering sheep’s head stew especially for him. He was quite touched by the offer, since in Ferelden the head was usually considered the best part. “Besides, we’re hardly in a position to turn down free food, are we?”

 _That is not FOOD,_   Justice objected vehemently.  _That is an atrocity which should be granted a proper burial, not placed in one’s mouth!_

Anders laughed. “I like it,” he said. “Actually, it kind of reminds me of you – your old body, at least!”

He reached into the cauldron and plucked out the steaming sheep’s skull with the tips of his fingers. Internally, he felt the spirit equivalent of a full-body shudder.  _It still has eyes!_   Justice squawked.

“Of course it does. The eyes are the best part,” Anders said with a laugh. He reached out and waggled the hanging jaw, doing his best imitation of Justice’s voice. “Hi, I’m Justice and I’m the patron spirit of  _never having any fun, ever.”_

If spirits could gag, then that was unmistakably what Anders felt as Justice drew back in an offended huff, withdrawing deep within Anders’ mind. He felt a little bad for it – but at least Justice wouldn’t be around to object as he ate his sheep’s head in peace.

* * *

 _Anders,_   Justice said warningly.

They were halfway up to Sundermount. They were always going to Sundermount for something; Anders hadn’t really been listening when Hawke told them what this trip was about. Something about killing mercenaries? He’d been paying more attention to the rippling of Hawke’s biceps, unobstructed from view by anything so mundane as  _sleeves._  Honestly, how did any mage get biceps like that? Did Hawke bench-press Templars in full plate?

The view from the back was nothing to sneeze at, either – from back here Anders had an unobstructed view of Hawke’s ass flexing as the other mage climbed the path to Sundermount. The sun and the climb combined left them all sweating through their clothes, and the dark-stained patches of fabric clung lovingly to the body beneath, sliding aside to provide tempting glimpses of sun-bronzed skin. A single drop of sweat made its way slowly down the line of Hawke’s back –

 _Anders, we are on a mission!_ Justice prodded him, sounding annoyed.  _We could be ambushed at any moment!_

Anders did the mental equivalent of elbowing the spirit aside so as not to obstruct his view. “I’m not doing anything, I’m just looking,” he muttered.

“What was that, Anders?” Hawke said, looking back at him. Anders stuttered, caught out.

“Uh… I’m just looking… for a place to camp for the night,” he said hastily. “We should do that pretty soon, shouldn’t we? Before it gets too dark.”

“Not a bad idea,” Hawke said with a shrug. “If you see any likely spots, give me a shout.”

 _Oh, I’ll shout for you, Hawke,_   Anders thought, and felt a hot blush flood his face even as his pants twitched warningly. “Uh – I thought I spotted a nice clearing just over there!” he managed to say. “I’ll go scout it and let you know!”

He could feel Justice’s withering scorn for the poor deception like a second sun on the back of his neck, but there was no helping it. Anders stumbled off the path and just barely managed to conceal himself from sight before his trousers were shoved down around his thighs and his hand was shoved down his smalls.

 _This is not the appropriate time or place for such things,_  Justice scolded. _You should be in a bed, in a private place. With doors. And locks. Not out in the bushes in the middle of the day!_

“The more you keep talking,” Anders panted out between gritted teeth, “the longer this is going to take. And then the others really will come looking for us.”

Justice withdrew, still radiating disapproval, into the back of Anders’ mind. He took a deep breath, spat in his palm, and redoubled his efforts.

It didn’t take long – there was no coherent narrative in his mind, just a scattered flurry of images of Hawke’s ass, Hawke’s arms, Hawke’s thighs, Hawke’s delicious looking neck, Hawke’s gleaming smile, Hawke’s laugh, Hawke’s sultry voice –

He came with his teeth biting hard into his lower lip, Circle training not letting him make a sound. After a few moments of panting to catch his breath, he found some handy non-poisonous foliage to wipe up, tucked himself back into his pants, and scrambled for the path.

He just hoped that the others wouldn’t get suspicious – not after the last three times.

All right,  _maybe_  Justice had a point.

* * *

Over the years Anders had been present at a great many births – starting with his healer apprenticeship back at the Tower and continuing on through his many escapes, his stay at the Pearl, and now his tenure as the Darktown Healer. Some were easy, some were hard, some tragic and some joyful, but one thing they all were was messy.

This one was no exception – an hour ago Anders had been kneeling between his patient’s legs with his arm up to the elbow in her vagina, ear pressed to her stretched stomach to listen in on the baby’s stressed heartbeat, trying to convince the baby to turn the right way around so as not to cause a breach birth. The clinic stank of blood (now healed, thankfully,) sweat, shit and piss, and the blankets on the cot the new mother lay resting on were probably not ever going to be clean.

Even the baby that Anders was now wrapping in a clean square of linen was hardly pretty – squirming, squalling, crusted with sticky snotlike fluid forming a clear gel over its purplish skin. So Anders was somewhat surprised to feel Justice pressing closer to their shared surface, eager to get a closer look at the little thing.

“I wouldn’t have thought this would interest you,” Anders murmured, his lips barely moving and his voice drowned out by the happy cries of the woman’s family as his assistant ushered them into the room.

 _It is beautiful,_   Justice said in his head, the spirit’s voice hushed and echoing with awe.  _It is so small! Yet I can sense the soul within. It did not exist before and now it does. Neither the mother nor her mate are mages, and yet they have accomplished a work of creation greater than any Fade spirit is capable of. Do you not feel it? Is it not incredible?_

Truth be told, he did; it was what put a smile on his face despite his exhaustion, despite the stress and strain of the last few hours. “It is,” he agreed, and turned to present the baby to the thrilled new parents.

Who were considerably less thrilled as soon as the baby’s head was uncovered, revealing a patch of fuzzy black hair – when both the young woman resting on the cot and the young man hovering over her shoulder were blond. Accusations were flung like punches, then  _actual_   punches, and somehow Anders found himself trying to mediate a knife-fight in his clinic before he’d even had a chance to wash his hands.

 _Mortals,_   Justice remarked, withdrawing in disgust – and not for the first time, Anders wished he could go with him.

~end.


End file.
